Matroska

Published in 2003 May 1, matroska is a challenging project, aiming to become the standard of Multimedia Container Formats one day. It was derived from a similar project called MCF, but differentiates from that significantly because it is based on EBML[?] (Extensible Binary Meta Language ), a kind of binary version of XML. This way the development team gains significant advantages in terms of future format extensability, without breaking file support in old parsers.

It is maybe essential to first clarify in this context what exactly an Audio/Video container is, to avoid misunderstandings : this is not a video compression format, nor can it be used to compress music or pictures like MP3 or JPEG, as it is not a codec (shortform for (en)coder - decoder)! It is more like the envelope around several audio, video and subtitles streams, allowing the user to store a complete movie in one single file thats easy to handle, and making sure the audio and video can be played in Mediaplayers on PCs or standalone units in your living room, in perfect sync and with all the comfort you may expect from a modern container format, like

• extensability for future use
• menues ( like DVDs have )
• chapter entries
• selectable subtitle streams
• selectable audio streams
• fast seeking in the file
• high error recovery
• streamable over Internet (both HTTP and RTP)

Matroska is an open standards[?] project, means that its absolutely free to use and the technical specifications describing the bitstream are open to everybody, even to companies that like to support it in their products using a closed source implementation. However, a special form of license, to be released in written form together with the final version of it, will describe exactly how it maybe used in such cases. For more details visit the 'License' subpage on release date of the format here. The sourcecode of all the libraries developed by the matroska developement team will get licensed under GNU GPL and QPL license types (dual license), so that a big number of different licensing shemes can be accomplished and even commercial or closed source software can support matroska with its own library. Please contact the team for more details in this respect.

The founders of matroska have the following goals :

• create and document a modern, flexible, x-platform compatible Audio/Video container format
• establish matroska as the opensource alternative to existing containers such as AVI, ASF, MOV[?], RM[?], MP4[?], MPG[?]
• develop a set of tools for the creation, editing and implementation of matroska files, under a GNU GPL type license
• develop libraries and tools for software developers to be able to support matroska in their applications
• prepare hardware support of matroska files in next generations standalone units, in close cooperation with device manufacturers
• support adaptation and implementation of matroska's libraries into OpenBeOS Mediakit[?] and GStreamer[?] (Multimedia Framework for Linux, equivalent to Microsoft (TM) DirectShow[?] (R) for Windows (TM) )
• launch a set of DirectShow filters for playback and creation of matroska files on Windows (TM) Operating Systems